Blogs

SLA Management

Aravind Sivanesan, Solutions Consulting Director, Western US –

CIO/IT infrastructure owners have Service Level Agreements and objectives from their Internet Service and bandwidth providers. For example – roundtrip latency for traffic from NYC to SJC must not exceed 45ms. How can a CIO have a comparable SLA for application performance on his infrastructure?

While customers move from physical/virtual environments to shared/multi-tenant (private & public infrastructure) models, it is even more imperative to be able to guarantee predictable performance to the various individual businesses. But for VI, there is no single platform available to have actionable data / answers to questions regarding SLA compliance or service level “disagreements”, since 99% of the industry-wide SLAs are capacity & recoverability numbers (with “fine print”) which are less relevant for stable business outcomes.

VI provides granular visibility across the entire infrastructure stack (physical/virtual compute – Fabric – storage) with the ability to compartmentalize every transaction. VI presents a histogram view of real time performance versus 5/15-minute averages, without the use of processing intensive host agents / plug-ins and eliminating the vendor finger-pointing very common in complex environments. The ability to identify non-conforming / erratic one-off applications across a 1000+ VM / hypervisor environment can eliminate a “make or break” IT event with irreparable damage & front-page coverage on the Wall Street Journal!

In addition to managing service levels, the VW platform focuses on availability management & cost optimization as customers embrace more virtualized cloud environments and expensive new technologies involving flash arrays & converged stacks, to name a few.